The website for our new accounting software is coming right along. All the Answers pages are updated. Ditto for US and Canada payroll. Reference pages and the Getting Started manual are underway. The site rehab probably will finish sooner than planned.
Massive find/replaces make the work go faster. They remove HTML cruft, and rewrite instructions site-wide. Life sure feels grand when 50 pages update all at once!
The massive overhaul will be worth the effort. The new site looks good on phone, tablet or desktop. Google will like it much better. The code is cleaner, and easier to maintain.
Programmers have a reputation for being anal. There’s a good reason for that. Having tidy code is like having a tidy workbench. When everything is in place, you find stuff more easily. When they line up in rows, it’s easier to notice missing items or errors. Orderly code is easier on the brain, especially when you look at it for hours at a time. For example, this is the current code for the Arkansas SUTA paragraph:
And this is the new version:
The old code is chaos because most of the current site was set up in Design mode. It lets you see what the page looks like right away, but it builds ugly HTML. Editing the page later makes things even worse. Using tables instead of divs sure doesn’t help.
HTML uses lots of tags that are inside <>s. If you ever see a mystery > or weird formatting, somebody clicked wrong while editing near a tag. I’m sure we made a few of those. There also will be dead links from deleted pages, and other bugs.
Once everything is cleaned up, phase 2 will begin. Our staff will check every web page, and test the app against it. Then fix the C++ code, and tidy or rewrite the site as needed. And make videos, with links to and from the text pages.
Already the web work has turned up a few things we forgot to add in the new app. Now they’re fixed.
Writing explanations also leads to better interface. The Sort dialog is greatly improved. We added a second way to view reports, just to make instructions easier. We may do the same for Custom Layouts. If it takes lots of text to explain something, there’s usually a better way to do it.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
